Dread Reckoning When Reggae Legend Bob Marley Died In 1981, He Left 11 Children, $30 Million And A Tangled Legal Web That Has Kept His Heirs Chasing His Fortune For A Decade

September 29, 1991|BY RICHARD LEIBY

DIANE JOBSON ISN`T LIKE ANY lawyer you have ever seen. She`s barefoot, and her feet are callused and dirty. She`s smoking a hand-rolled marijuana cigar. Her brown hair, just going gray, is matted into dreadlocks, tucked beneath a black tam. She`s a Rasta lawyer.

For many years, Diane Jobson was legal counsel and close friend to Bob Marley, the great reggae musician and proponent of black liberation. Now she advises his mother, Cedella Marley Booker -- who, like everyone connected to the Marley estate, needs good legal advice.

And like every lawyer, Jobson knows a lawyer joke. Standing outside the Bob Marley crypt in Nine Miles, the Jamaican mountain village 30 miles west of Ocho Rios where he was born, she tells this one, her summation of 10 years of legal wrangling since Marley died of cancer:

``Two guys are walking on the beach and they see an oyster. One picks it up and says, ``Look at dis nice oyster.` The other says, `Let me see,` and takes it and opens it and finds a pearl. Then there`s an argument over who the pearl belongs to: the one who found the oyster or the one who discovered the pearl. They go to a lawyer, who says, ``Okay, I`ll help you settle it. You know what my fees are...`

``And he takes the pearl!``

Bob Marley`s mother, who hasn`t heard this one before, chimes in excitedly: ``That`s what`s going on with this estate. Yah, mon!``

Cedella Booker, 65, regal in flowing black robes and yellow headdress, is known in Jamaica as ``Mother B.`` She is matriarch of the sometimes contentious musical family that survived Marley; he had at least 11 children by eight different women. But he left no will, sparking endless claims for his fortune, suits and counter-suits.

Marley had little tangible property, but his recordings still generate $2.5 million a year in royalties. His estate may never have the earning potential of, say, Elvis Presley`s (still bringing in $15 million a year), but it`s an unbelievable bonanza in a dirt-poor country like Jamaica, where the minimum wage is the equivalent of $14 a week.

Mother B and other Marley family members are attempting to reclaim the reggae king`s legacy before it is lost completely to legal fees or auctioned to foreign investors. The estate is administered by Jamaica`s largest bank, with the courts intervening when necessary -- which is often. The heirs are furious that estate administrators and lawyers in Kingston, Miami and New York have reaped $4 million in fees while supposedly acting in the heirs` best interests.

The family was delivered a unifying focus for its outrage when lawyers, working on the estate`s behalf, sued to take away the house Marley had bought for his mother in Miami, and which she eventually got to keep. These lawyers were paid up to $250 an hour, while Mother B`s grandchildren were getting from $100 to $800 a month as their inheritances.

``He was a simple Rastaman,`` Mother B says of her son. ``Because he was so humble, because we are so humble, they think they can just trample over us.``

Certainly Marley was humble -- he lived as a devout Rastafarian, eating fruits and vegetables, smoking marijuana, sharing his fortune with thousands in need. He sang sweet songs about love, sun and rain.

But a simple man? Hardly: He also sang of African destiny and political violence, and thus constituted a threat to the Jamaican elite. And he kept so many lovers and side deals going that the list of those who can claim they were ``exclusively involved`` with Marley is extensive, says one estate lawyer.

It`s too easy and tidy to claim that the estate mess is the fault of rapacious litigators. It is a far more complicated affair, involving a class struggle and a clan struggle. ``Family`` here is an exceedingly fluid term: Settlement of the estate has been hopelessly delayed because of feuding, particularly among the women who bore Marley`s children. It hasn`t helped that Rita Marley, Bob`s lawful widow, has admitted to signing backdated documents and forging Bob`s signature, leading to a lawsuit charging that $14 million in assets were ``fraudulently diverted`` when she had control of the estate from 1981 to `86. Alliances shift constantly. Meanwhile, several backup musicians who played in Marley`s band, the Wailers, also are suing for a share of the estate.

All of the usual human failings -- greed, jealousy, hypocrisy -- are on view in the squabble, but there`s another complicating factor: This is also about God, or at least a prophet of God, in the form of Bob Marley.

The musician has reached such revered stature that the battle has moved to a spiritual plane: To some in the Marley clan, the lawyers who snatched the pearl are the incarnate forces of ``Babylon,`` as Marley called the spiritually wicked material world.

He has risen above Babylon. But his heirs still live there, ever struggling, ever tempted.